The source dilemma hypothesis: Perceptual uncertainty contributes to musical emotion

Bonin, Tanor; Trainor, Laurel J.; Belyk, Michel; Andrews, Paul W.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.05.021

Cited by 15 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Or it could scale with the strength of emotional engagement, reflecting the functional interaction between subcortical (striatum, amygdala) and auditory cortical areas (Salimpoor et al, 2013;Liégeois-Chauvel et al, 2014;Salimpoor et al, 2015). Yet, these two factors of perceptual complexity and emotional appraisal could also be functionally related as shown in one recent study of musical emotional processing, in which judgments of negative valence were found to be related to the perceptual ambiguity/complexity in the auditory scene (Bonin et al, 2016). Our data show that although high and low arousing stimuli are associated with different levels of neural entrainment, spectral complexity of the musical material mediates this observed relationship.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Neural entrainment to music is sensitive to melodic spectral complexity

Wollman

Arias

Aucouturier

et al. 2020

Journal of Neurophysiology

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During auditory perception, neural oscillations are known to entrain to acoustic dynamics but their role in the processing of auditory information remains unclear. As a complex temporal structure that can be parameterized acoustically, music is particularly suited to address this issue. In a combined behavioral and EEG experiment in human participants, we investigated the relative contribution of temporal (acoustic dynamics) and nontemporal (melodic spectral complexity) dimensions of stimulation on neural entrainment, a stimulus-brain coupling phenomenon operationally defined here as the temporal coherence between acoustical and neural dynamics. We first highlight that low-frequency neural oscillations robustly entrain to complex acoustic temporal modulations, which underscores the fine-grained nature of this coupling mechanism. We also reveal that enhancing melodic spectral complexity, in terms of pitch, harmony, and pitch variation, increases neural entrainment. Importantly, this manipulation enhances activity in the theta (5 Hz) range, a frequency-selective effect independent of the note rate of the melodies, which may reflect internal temporal constraints of the neural processes involved. Moreover, while both emotional arousal ratings and neural entrainment were positively modulated by spectral complexity, no direct relationship between arousal and neural entrainment was observed. Overall, these results indicate that neural entrainment to music is sensitive to the spectral content of auditory information and indexes an auditory level of processing that should be distinguished from higher-order emotional processing stages. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Low-frequency (<10 Hz) cortical neural oscillations are known to entrain to acoustic dynamics, the so-called neural entrainment phenomenon, but their functional implication in the processing of auditory information remains unclear. In a behavioral and EEG experiment capitalizing on parameterized musical textures, we disentangle the contribution of stimulus dynamics, melodic spectral complexity, and emotional judgments on neural entrainment and highlight their respective spatial and spectral neural signature.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Neural entrainment to music is sensitive to melodic spectral complexity

Wollman

Arias

Aucouturier

et al. 2020

Journal of Neurophysiology

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“…The heterogeneous relationship between our two rating dimensions could, alternatively, also be explained in terms of the source dilemma hypothesis recently proposed by Bonin et al ., according to which “uncertainty in the number, identity or location of sound objects elicits unpleasant emotions by presenting the auditory system with an incoherent percept” 57 . In that study, Bonin et al .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The pleasantness of sensory dissonance is mediated by musical style and expertise

Popescu

Neuser

Neuwirth

et al. 2019

Sci Rep

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Western musical styles use a large variety of chords and vertical sonorities. Based on objective acoustical properties, chords can be situated on a dissonant-consonant continuum. While this might to some extent converge with the unpleasant-pleasant continuum, subjective liking might diverge for various chord forms from music across different styles. Our study aimed to investigate how well appraisals of the roughness and pleasantness dimensions of isolated chords taken from real-world music are predicted by Parncutt’s established model of sensory dissonance. Furthermore, we related these subjective ratings to style of origin and acoustical features of the chords as well as musical sophistication of the raters. Ratings were obtained for chords deemed representative of the harmonic language of three different musical styles (classical, jazz and avant-garde music), plus randomly generated chords. Results indicate that pleasantness and roughness ratings were, on average, mirror opposites; however, their relative distribution differed greatly across styles, reflecting different underlying aesthetic ideals. Parncutt’s model only weakly predicted ratings for all but Classical chords, suggesting that listeners’ appraisal of the dissonance and pleasantness of chords bears not only on stimulus-side but also on listener-side factors. Indeed, we found that levels of musical sophistication negatively predicted listeners’ tendency to rate the consonance and pleasantness of any one chord as coupled measures, suggesting that musical education and expertise may serve to individuate how these musical dimensions are apprehended.

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“…Arnal et al 2015 show that an acoustic property of human screams called 'roughness' (corresponding to amplitude modulations ranging from 30 to 150 Hz) specifically targets subcortical brain areas involved in danger processing -and of course does so irrespective of any semantics. Somewhat closer to our topic, Bonin et al 2016 state a 'source dilemma' hypothesis according to which "uncertainty in the number, identity or location of sound objects elicits unpleasant emotions by presenting the auditory system with an incoherent percept" -and they show experimentally that subjects rate "congruent auditory scene cues as more pleasant than melodies with incongruent auditory scene cues." Here it is not so much the inferences about sources that yield emotions as the difficulty of identifying the sources.…”

Section: Types Of Emotional Inferencesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Prolegomena to Music Semantics

Schlenker

2018

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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We argue that a formal semantics for music can be developed, although it will be based on very different principles from linguistic semantics and will yield less precise inferences. Our framework has the following tenets: (i) Music cognition is continuous with normal auditory cognition. (ii) In both cases, the semantic content derived from an auditory percept can be identified with the set of inferences it licenses on its causal sources, analyzed in appropriately abstract ways (e.g. as 'voices' in some Western music). (iii) What is special about music semantics is that it aggregates inferences based on normal auditory cognition with further inferences drawn on the basis of the behavior of voices in tonal pitch space (through more or less stable positions, for instance). (iv) This makes it possible to define an inferential semantics but also a truth-conditional semantics for music. In particular, a voice undergoing a musical movement m is true of an object undergoing a series of events e just in case there is a certain structure-preserving map between m and e. (v) Aspects of musical syntax (notably Lerdahl and Jackendoff's 'time-span reductions') might be derivable on semantic grounds from an event mereology ('partology'), which also explains some cases in which tree structures are inadequate for music (overlap, ellipsis). (vi) Intentions and emotions may be attributed at several levels (the source, the musical narrator, the musician), and we speculate on possible explanations of the special relation between music and emotions.

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The source dilemma hypothesis: Perceptual uncertainty contributes to musical emotion

Cited by 15 publications

References 51 publications

Neural entrainment to music is sensitive to melodic spectral complexity

Neural entrainment to music is sensitive to melodic spectral complexity

The pleasantness of sensory dissonance is mediated by musical style and expertise

Prolegomena to Music Semantics

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